On Plato’s ‘The Symposium’- The Structure of Desire
It is not without reason
That this hollow
Has been put away in a wilderness.
It means
The place of love
Lies not in beaten ways
Nor about our human dwellings.
Love haunts the deserts.
The road that leads to its retreat
Is a hard and toilsome road.
- Gottfried von Strassburg, (died c.1210), ‘Tristan and Iseult’
What is love? Romantic love, of the kind exemplified in the tale of Tristan and Iseult for instance, could hardly be said to have emerged in medieval Western Europe, though it did take on its distinctive form and vibrancy in medieval Christianity with the code of chivalry associated with the feudal social order, and furthermore, it developed a somewhat commanding rationale peculiarly its own, carrying it beyond its restricted aristocratic beginnings to become almost universally celebrated in the Western world to such an extent that romantic love is such a forceful notion that for many of us perhaps it is the first and only real meaning that the word love has, the first thing coming to mind when asked: what is love? The word romance derives from romanicus, in the Roman style, and in the Middle Ages people looked back upon the grandeur of the Roman Empire as eclipsing their own less cultivated age in its attainments. Over the course of time the term romantic came to refer to almost anything grand and glorious, particularly the forces of nature, and the forces of human emotions, in contrast to the ordinary constraints of diurnal life and rationality and morality. A romantic view is one that extols heroic figures and adventurous exploits, passionate life as opposed to a more circumspect and seemly life, and hence romantic love refers to those types of relationships in which feelings and emotions that are running high come to the fore. Indeed, a certain kind of feeling is regarded as the sure sign of romantic love and its presence or absence is crucial, for it cannot be forced or be made to happen, and why it comes or why it goes is somewhat mysterious, it carries an almost supernatural aspect to it as we fall in love and into a state of helplessness, and upon being in thrall to love almost any kind of behaviour, no matter how outlandish, appears warranted.
There are of course other types of love, some of which are even harder to fathom. Christian love, for instance, whereby something more than human relationships is brought into the equation, namely, God, not merely as an additional factor but as the very grounding of human relationships. The love of God takes precedence over finding oneself in another while fundamentally altering both the nature of the self and the other. But why? Christian love necessarily connects to an affirmation of God’s transcendence over nature and history and all of our relationships to each other as well as our relation to nature only make sense in relation to God, who is beyond both nature and humanity. ‘He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love’. (1 ‘John’ 4:8). What does ‘God is love’ mean and how does God show us love? The Bible goes on to tell us: ‘In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.’ (1 ‘John’ 4:9–11).
‘For ultimately love to God is the decisive thing’, said Søren Kierkegaard, (1813–1815), ‘from it stems love to the neighbour, but paganism never suspected this. They left God out; they made earthly love and friendship into love, and abominated selfishness. But the Christian commandment of love commands men to love God above all else, and next to love the neighbour. In earthly love and friendship partiality is the middle term. In love to the neighbour, God is the middle term; if you love God above all else, then you also love your neighbour and in your neighbour every man. Only by loving God above all else can one love his neighbour in the other man. The other man, this is the neighbour who is the other man in the sense that the other man is every other man. Consequently, thus understood, the discourse was right when in the beginning it said that if a man loves his neighbour in one single other man, then he loves all men’.
The logic of Christian love seems to proceeds like this: made in the image of God as we are (whatever that means, ‘Genesis’ 1:1:26–27), we have a godlike ability to transcend (whatever that means), that which is natural and do that which is neither expected of us or necessary, fasting or celibacy for instance, thereby demonstrating a dominion over nature and reason and an openness and indeterminacy in all human experience, and hence how we love is similarly open and undetermined. This differs then from romantic love or love based upon sexual desire and is grounded upon a particular Biblical picture of human nature. Romantic love and sexual desire is based upon lack, upon human need requiring fulfilling, whereas Christian love originates in a presence within human experience, unbidden, and undefined (conveniently), transcending the logic of nature and the calculation of self-interest. There is something rather odd here though. God is love, that cannot be love based upon lack because God is perfect and lacks nothing, but how can we make sense of a love that isn’t satisfying anything? Paul Tillich, (1886–1965), asserted: ‘Justice, power, and love towards oneself is rooted in the justice, power, and love which we receive from that which transcends us and affirms us. The relation to ourselves is a function of our relation to God’. What sense can be made out of that?
‘It is not their love for me, rather it is the impotence of their love that hinders Christians of today from burning us’, as Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844–1900), said.
So what of moral love? For Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), the intelligible world is governed both by forces that draw humankind together, this is love, and forces that keep them separate, this is respect, for the moral life is lived in this tension between attraction and repulsion, indeed a proper moral relation cannot have love without respect or respect without love, and our duties always incorporate both of these considerations with sometimes one and sometimes the other being more prominent. Such a perspective certainly has its dignity, lover and beloved regarding each other as autonomous, each fully respecting the sovereign powers of reason and choice in the other, and the pleasure they take in each other is not in the passions, which are selfish in their objectives, but in the gratification of their mutual rationality because this is what truly unites them. But is not all of this assuming human beings to be much more rational than they are? Neither partner seeking to exploit the other, any sort of domination or submission necessarily precluded, a strong sense of moral obligation each feeling for the other arising out of their rational natures and their principled relation to each other rather than from external constraints imposed on them by society, wishing for each other the fulfilment of rational virtue, problems arising not from not knowing what to do but from conflicting moral claims. Are not Kantian principles without content? To be moral is to be willing to bring one’s actions under rational scrutiny, to listen to reason, hence the process of moral reconsideration and justification is forever open, and moral love apparently would be simply this kind of accountability beginning with one’s partner and extending to humankind as a whole and consequently ending up as impotent as Christian love.
And love as power? All is fair in love and war. Love can be overwhelming and ruthless like war, with lovers behaving as if their very being were at stake and hence moral concerns are cast to one side, moral goodness being a trivial matter by comparison. Such is a return to a primordial state of nature where savage self-interest is uppermost, as described by Thomas Hobbes, (1588–1679), whereby fear and desire rule us and what we call good are those things that we desire, and those things that inspire fear and aversion we call evil. Mutual respect, principled relations, constancy and consistency, all out of the picture, what matters most is our pleasure and our security, how to get what we want and how to keep what we get. Such love is grounded upon our feelings of vulnerability, that is where the struggle for power originates, each person seeks by whatever means to make his or her insecure existence as secure as possible. And we do have the power of life and death over each other, and thereby recognize our vulnerability in love, for if our beloved means everything to us we are in thrall to them, they could extinguish our life or rob it of its meaning by withdrawing their love. In loving we give the beloved power over us, we need our beloved albeit our beloved is a threat to us. Love becomes something to be feared because of how vulnerable it makes us. And conversely we may believe we have power over our beloved and love justifies all, and at bottom what we desire most intensely is love, and what we fear most seriously is the loss of love. Hence, love is like war in that it is the struggle for something even as important as life itself.
With Plato’s, (428/427 or 424/423–348/347 BC), dialogue the ‘Symposium’, however, we have more subtlety and ingenuity than hitherto demonstrated on the idea of love, for the discourse gets under way with our conventional notion of sexual love but then extends our understanding so that we see how this erotic power leads to personal growth and intellectual development, even to the passion for science and political order. Erotic love, Plato demonstrates for us, is not merely sexual desire but desire understood in a far more fundamental and far-reaching sense, and Plato argues this way because he believes, in some very profound sense, that the proper understanding of love is the key to most of our important problems.
The principle ideas forwarded in the ‘Symposium’ are as follows:
1. During a banquet a number of speeches praising the god Love are delivered, the first speech, by Phaedrus, (c. 444 BC — 393 BC), makes the claim that love between virtuous men and youths is of the highest type, the chief motive to a noble life.
2. Pausanius, (fl. c. 420 BC), distinguishes between common Love, which is of the body, and heavenly Love, which is the love of virtue and philosophy.
3. Eryximachus, (c. 448 — late 5th c. BC or early 4th c. BC), the physician argues that love is the principle of harmony which reconciles the hostile elements in the body.
4. Aristophanes, (c. 446 — c. 386 BC), satirising physiological theories of love, maintains that the human body was originally round, having four arms, four feet, a head with two faces, and so forth, and that Zeus, to punish men for rebellion, split them in two, and ever since that time the halves have sought each other avidly, the desire to be reunited in love.
5. Agathon, (c. 448 — c. 400 BC), praises Love as the most beautiful and youngest of the gods, possessed of all the virtues.
6. Socrates, (c. 470–399 BC), explains how from a love of the beauty of physical objects one can pass to the apprehension of the nature of Beauty itself, the ideal, and thereby share Love’s divinity.
The ‘Symposium’ is a masterpiece as a work of art albeit other dialogues are of greater philosophical import, for its great range, from discussions of physical love to an almost mystical vision of eternal, absolute Beauty makes it both art and philosophy. The range of subject and level of discussion is apparently reflected in the original Greek and in some translations by differences in the language and style of individual speakers, and the contrasts thus afforded contribute to the dramatic excellence of the work. The dramatic effect is also enhanced by the order and structure of the dialogue, which is an account by Apollodorus, (c. 429–4th c. BC), of a banquet described to him by Aristodemus, (5th c. BC). At the banquet a number of speeches are given, leading up to and culminating in that of Plato’s beloved teacher and paragon of philosophy, Socrates.
The dramatic poet Agathon has just won the prize for his first tragedy and is celebrating at home with his guests. Because of the aftereffects of yesterday’s drinking it is agreed that the entertainment shall consist chiefly of conversation. Eryximachus recalls Phaedrus’ frequent observation that while other gods and heroes have had ample praises and honours, Love has been singularly neglected, and so he proposes that each man deliver a speech praising this god. All agree to this proposal,Socrates remarking that he claims understanding of nothing other than this subject. Readers familiar with Socrates will see in this statement a hint that the symposium on Love will remain on no ordinary level, for Socrates, above all his contemporaries, is able to transcend the sensual.
Since the topic originated with Phaedrus, Plato’s friend, he is invited to speak first. Phaedrus’ speech is a rather commonplace encomium setting the stage for later speeches. He describes Love as the oldest of the gods, full of power and the author of the greatest blessings. Conceiving love of the highest type as that between virtuous men and youths. Phaedrus believes that the chief motives to the noble life are the desire for honour and the fear of dishonour and shame. The love between men is above all else the source of this motive, for the lover and the beloved hate nothing more than disgrace in each other’s eyes, hence, they are courageous and self-sacrificing, even to the point of death. A nation or army constituted by such lovers would be almost invincible. (Apparently there was such an army, the Sacred Band of Thebes, a troop of select soldiers, consisting of 150 pairs of male lovers which formed the elite force of the Theban army in the 4th century BC, ending Spartan domination). Thus, Love not only serves as the chief source of virtue, but also, as seen in the stories of Alcestis and Achilles, gives happiness after death.
Pausanius thinks the foregoing is indiscriminate. Love is not one but twofold, one part is noble and one part is not. There is an elder, heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Uranus and having no mother, and also a younger, common Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus and Dione. Therefore, there are two Loves, the offspring of each. The common Love, whose mother was both male and female parentage, desires either women or youths and is merely of the body, without regard for good or evil, the noble or the base, and being of the body in its cravings, is also like the body in temporality. The heavenly Love, however, whose mother was born from the male alone, seeks the male as the more valiant and intelligent. Lovers of this sort seek out youths of promising virtue and intellect with the intent of educating and developing them. Lovers of the body have brought only disgrace on Love, and some societies disapprove of attachments between men and youths, the question of their propriety is not simple, depending upon whether the attitudes and manners involved are honourable or not. Pausanias thinks that when love of youths and the practice of philosophy and virtue coalesce, this love is noble and mutually profitable. On the subject of male to male action one needs to keep in mind the distinction Pausanias makes between the two kinds of love, as well as the fact that since Greek women were not educated morally and intellectually, communion with them could not attain the level of that between men. (Though see my article On Plato’s ‘Apology’ — the Subjective Principle, on the heterai).
The next speech affords a transition to a higher plane which the physician Eryximachus declares his discovery from medicine that love is indeed two-fold, but not just in man, this duality is a universal principle. His position, reminiscent of Heraclitus’ and Empedocles’ teachings, is illustrated by the fact that in the body there are hostile loves and desires both healthy and diseased, medicine is the art of satisfying the one type, eliminating or converting the other. Hostile elements in the body must be reconciled if there is to be health, just as a proper arrangement of high and low notes is needed to produce musical harmony, and an orderly combination of short and long beats to produce rhythm. Hot and cold, moist and dry must be blended by harmonious love in order to secure the well-being of men, animals and plants, whereas if wanton love causes an excessive degree of one element, injury follows. Even divination or communion between men and the gods is concerned with enhancing the good and curing the evil love. The former originates happiness and harmony with gods and men.
Eryximachus’ speech is serious and apparently intended to be scientific, but it is followed by that of the great dramatist Aristophanes, who satirises current physiological theories. In order to explain the power of love properly, Aristophanes first gives the background of human nature: Originally there were three sexes, male, female, and the male-female, and the body was round, having four arms, four feet, two sexual organs, and one head with two faces. This race became so powerful it attacked the gods in heaven, and Zeus, in order to punish human beings without destroying them, since after all the gods would not wish to forego the sacrifices and worship men provided, reduced their power and doubled their number by splitting them in two. The two halves, however, sought each other avidly, and when reunited would not separate long enough to tend to the usual affairs of life, hence they began to perish. While in the original division the face had been turned around to the sectioned side, the sexual organs had not, now Zeus contrived to move them around so that when the two halves of the man-woman came together, conception and reproduction would occur, or if the two halves of males or females embraced, sexual gratification would prepare them to return to their daily tasks. Consequently, sections of the double nature lust after members of the opposite sex, but halves of the other two sexes seek their own kind. Males who seek the male, therefore, are not shameless but rather desirous of the manly and best, as is evinced by the number of statesmen so inclined. The association is not merely sexual, however, it stems from a most fundamental desire for fusion into one being, and perfect satisfaction and happiness would lie in reunion with the original other halves of our nature, but failing this, the next best is to find loves congenial to us. Thus Love leads us back to our own nature in this life and the next, and hence it deserves highest praise. So ends Aristophanes’ speech, in the main highly fantastic but with a germ of truth in its description of the desire for unity. Professor A. E.Taylor, (1869–1945), even suggests that it might distantly foreshadow Socrates’ coming account of the soul as longing for communion with its true good.
Agathon’s turn is next. As might be expected of a dramatic poet, his words are rhetorically brilliant rather than philosophically cogent. He argues that Love is the most beautiful of the gods because the youngest, and the youngest because swift enough to outrun old age. Love is tender and soft because he goes about and dwells in the softest places, the hearts and souls of gods and men. He is just, neither suffering nor exerting force, all men serve him of their own wills. He is temperate, because temperance rules pleasure and no pleasure is greater than that of love. That he is courageous is evident in that Ares yielded to Aphrodite. He must be wise, for he is a poet, and at his touch teaches everyone to become a poet. He is the creator of all animals, inspirer of all arts, peacemaker among the gods. His is the love of beauty rather than of deformity, and as the author of love of the beautiful he has originated every heavenly and earthly god. Agathon’s praise ends in a grand flourish of words which win the acclaim of all present and which Socrates uses as occasion for pretended dismay as Agathon’s successor.
Actually, however, Plato exploits this florid but somewhat vacuous panegyric as a stage setting for the more substantial and more enduring lustrous speech of Socrates. He did not realize, Socrates says, that the intent was to praise Love, by giving him every good quality without regard for the facts, whereas he knows only how to speak the truth, and he will proceed only if that is what the other wishes to hear. Upon their reassurance, Socrates begins by asking questions, as is his wont, to which the answers given by Agathon lead up to the desired conclusions. By this dialectical method he shows that since love is love of or desire for something, love cannot presently possess the objection of its affection. Even when one is said to desire that which he has, what is really meant is that one desires its continued or future possession. Now it was stated that Love is one of the beautiful rather than of the deformed, if so it follows that love itself cannot be beautiful. While this reasoning is not altogether convincing, the general point that desired qualities pertain to the object rather than to the subject’s desire is plausible. And since there is a basic identity between the good and the beautiful, it follows also that love wants, rather than has, the good.
Socrates now proceeds to an account of Love allegedly taught him by a woman of wisdom, Diotima of Mantea, (circa 440 B.C.). (Seer and priestess and the name of a well-known temple prostitute in ancient Greece, probably Socrates had been looking for sex, and found wisdom instead. Which to have preferred? Wisdom or sex? Tough call). Love is neither fair (handsome or beautiful) nor good, but this does not imply that he is ugly or evil, for just as there is a mean between wisdom and ignorance, right opinion, which is not wisdom because it cannot give adequate reason for its belief, and which is not ignorance, since it is true, so there is a mean between beauty and ugliness, good and evil, Furthermore, Love is not a god, for the gods are admittedly happy, beautiful, and in possession of all goods. Love is neither mortal nor immortal, but an intermediate spirit who interprets between gods and men by forwarding prayers and sacrifices to the gods and commands and answers to human beings. The understanding of this function of Love is spiritual wisdom, whereas knowledge of skills and arts is a much lower order. Presumably this remark is intended for Agathon, who instanced Love’s wisdom by showing him to be the source of poetry,
As to Love’s ancestry Diotima told this tale, on Aphrodite’s birthday the gods held a feast at which Poros (Plenty) son of Metis (Discretion) became tipsy on nectar and lay down to sleep. Penia (Poverty) having come to the door to beg as usual, saw an opportunity to better herself and lay down by Poros, thus Love was conceived. Both because Aphrodite is beautiful and Love was born on her birthday, he is now her devotee, but in accordance with his mixed parentage are his character and fortune, because of his mother he is poor, rough, squalid, without a roof over his head, but like his father he is scheming, bold, aggressive, clever, strong, a great enchanter. Neither mortal nor immortal, he flourishes at one moment,perishes the next. His intermediate nature also makes him a philosopher, gods and wise men already possess wisdom, and the ignorant are self-satisfied, this is the evil of ignorance, but Love as a mean between the ignorant and the wise is a lover of wisdom, since ‘wisdom is the most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful’. Socrates’ and his companions’ previous error in attributing qualities such as beauty and wisdom to Love lay in confusion between love and the beloved.
‘Of what use is love to man?’ Socrates asked Diotima. Her reply was that this amounted to asking what man desires in loving the beautiful, it turns out that what he really desires is possession of the good, which is what we mean by happiness, but we cannot ask again why one desires happiness, since happiness is an ultimate end. All men seek happiness rather than something like the other half of themselves, love then is really ‘of the everlasting possession of the good’. A further question concerned the manner of the pursuit of love’s object. All men, Diotima continued, desire to procreate the beautiful, whether in body or in soul. Love is not therefore of the beautiful alone but of generation in beauty, of what today we would call creativity. This is true because only through generation or reproduction can that which is mortal gain a kind of immortality. Not only human beings but other animals as well love and desire immortality, and since all physical things undergo constant change and succession the only means of attaining permanence is by generating offspring to take the parents’ places. Change is here attributed even to the soul, but Socrates and Plato believe the soul, being immortal, is not subject to those laws governing the body, and this is why procreation is desired so passionately and offspring are given such anxious care, even to the point that parents sacrifice their lives if necessary. The desire for immortality accounts also for the otherwise senseless ambition which drives so many people. In fact, Diotima said, this desire motivates all things which people do, even the practice of great virtues which people hope will keep them in memory.
Thus, some procreation is not of the body, some men are pregnant in body only, but some are creative in soul, they write poems or paint pictures, they conceive wisdom and virtues, best of all wisdom about the organization of states and families.Such creations of statesmen, lawmakers, and artists are preferable to human children, being more beautiful and more immortal, and the friendships out of which they are born are actually close than those which bring forth children in the flesh. One may note how far this account of love transcends the earlier ones but it is still only of what Diotima described as the ‘lesser mysteries of love’. Yet if practiced in the right way these point to the higher. In a passage among the most significant in Plato because its description of the dialectical ascent to vision of absolute beauty would apply to knowledge of the other Ideas or Forms as well, Diotima’s description of beauty is recalled by Socrates.
The proper procedure in the apprehension of beauty is to begin in youth to appreciate physical or external beauty of one object, letting this inspire fair thoughts, from this one should grow into the realization that the beauties of all physical things are related, and thus transcend narrow devotion to one. The next level is the insight that beauty of mind is preferable to that of outward appearance, at this stage the lover is moved to nurture the character and intellect of promising youths.Then he is prepared to ascend to the next (each step is progressively more abstract) that in which the beauty of institutions and laws becomes evident.The beauty of the sciences is even higher, and he who perceives this will then proceed to a vision of a unique science, that of beauty in itself. The final reward and the goal of this laborious ascent is apprehension of the nature (which Plato in other contexts calls the Form or Idea) of beauty:
‘… a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another … foul, as if fair to some and foul to others … or in the likeness of … any ..part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being, as, for example, in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. He who from these ascending under the influence of love, begins to perceive that beauty is not far from the end. And the true order of going … to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This … is the life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute …’
Socrates maintains that anyone living a life of communion with the ultimately real beauty, as Diotima has described it, will share Love’s divinity and reality and goodness, becoming a friend of the gods and achieving immortality as far as is possible for a person. There is no better aid to this end than that of Love, and this is why and how Love ought to be praised. As Socrates thus ends his speech, a sudden change of tone is introduced by the entrance of the drunken Alcibiades, who adequately reinforces the Socratic teaching by recalling ways in which the master practices it. Willing to participate only if the others will drink, Alcibiades empties a half-gallon wine vessel and has it filled for Socrates, calling attention to the fact, however, that Socrates can drink any amount without becoming drunk. When asked to speak, Alcibiades admits that he is in no condition to vie with others in praise of Love, and he chooses to praise Socrates instead.
Socrates, he begins, looks like a satyr, indeed he is like the busts of Silenus which open up to reveal images of gods inside them. He is like the satyr Marsyas too, the marvellous flute player whose melodies charm all hearers, except that Socrates pipes with words even more powerful than those of Pericles. He is the only man who is able to shame Alcibiades for neglecting his own soul to attend public affairs, and only the love of popularity tears him away from Socrates’ spell. In spite of the latter’s rough exterior and pretension of ignorance, he is full of temperance and true beauty, despising the popular versions of beauty, wealth, honour. While still a youth, Alcibiades became enamoured of Socrates because of the master’s shining virtues, and sought to become his beloved. But his association, had it been consummated, as it was not, would have been motivated solely by Alcibiades’ desire to render service to a master admired for his wisdom and goodness and ability to impart these, for Socrates was certainly unattractive physically. But Alcibiades recounts how his advances became more and more overt with absolutely no effect on Socrates, which made the handsome youth realize fully how genuine was the philosopher’s self-control. But this was only one of many occasions in which the almost superhuman virtues of Socrates were exhibited, Alcibiades continues. While at war Socrates was able to go without food and rest with incomparable stamina, he marched better barefoot on the ice than other soldiers whose feet were shod. Once, while engrossed in a difficult problem, Socrates stood in one spot from one dawn to the next, to the amazement of fellow soldiers who slept out in the open to keep watch on his endurance. But Socrates was not just a dreamer, he rescued Alcibiades in battle and should have had the prize for valour actually awarded to the latter. Although he seems a satyr in appearance, also like the statues with gods inside are Socrates’ words, ridiculous at first but when examined found to have unparalleled significance, to be ‘of the most divine, abounding in fair images of virtue, and of the widest comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty of a good and honourable man’.
Shortly after Alcibiades’ laud of Socrates the formal order of the banquet breaks up, some men leave, some drink themselves to sleep. When Aristodemus awoke at dawn, there was Socrates still holding forth in argument to an audience of only Agathon and Aristophanes. So ends a dialogue remarkable for its picture of Socrates’outward appearance, moral character, and ability to take, or leave, the earthly point of departure for the realm of reason and intellect. Especially valuable for the student of Plato is its account of the dialectical approach to the vision of Forms. Careful examination of the long quoted passage will reveal also that many other essential features of the theory of Forms are suggested there, the Forms are simple, unique, immaterial, immutable, eternal, ultimately real natures which give particular objects their being. The Form of absolute Beauty here described is obviously, on both internal and external evidence, that which Plato elsewhere calls the Good. One might well compare the account in the ‘Symposium’ with those of other dialogues, especially with the Myth of the Cave in the ‘Republic’, but the ‘Symposium’ glistens with beauties of its own, Where else can one find such philosophical discourse on love coupled with such lovely discourse upon philosophy?
A much richer account of love is to be found in Plato than in later philosophers, primarily due to his digging deeper into the nature of desire. Love as attaining power, love as wanting to fulfil one’s duties or moral obligations, love as love of humanity grounded upon and deriving its meaning from love of a supernatural entity, love as romance or chivalry, assume somewhat superficial understandings of desire. According to Aristophanes the objective of desire was to merge with or lose oneself into the object, and Plato picked up upon what is lacking in such an account, the objective was rather to sustain its object, to sustain contemplative access to its object, in the long run to sustain desire, and to so sustain the object was to reproduce it in some way, which in the earthly and sexual realm may occur through children. For those within Plato’s cave desire involves representation, for those contemplating the Forms love of the Form of Beauty engenders virtue, the effect of Beauty is to sustain something in us, and desire generates its psychical structure, not merely a passing structure connected with temporary acts of knowing or feeling, but virtues, persisting dispositions to think, to feel, and to act in particular ways. How do you know you are in love? The beloved really does inspire in you the desire to be a better person.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 -1880), matches Plato in his account and goes even deeper into his analysis of the structure of desire. If we think of Love as not to merge but to reproduce, or to put it another way, if the real objective of desire is to internalize difference without abolishing it, that is very Hegelian sounding, a way of expressing the insight that the existence of self-consciousness is predicated upon a reciprocal relation between self-consciousnesses, one of recognition, and whatever the degree of our commitment to epistemological scepticism may be the Absolute is not an object but a Form, not an aspect of Being but something like the Platonic Form of the Beautiful, from which notion we can better comprehend the structure of Desire itself, akin in structure to a structure of the psyche, for we cannot separate the notion of being as a thing or entity from that of a relation to otherness, and ultimately from such notions of power, force, law, causality, which notions may be present in a vague sense in the various accounts of love, for upon reflection such structures converge with the notions of self-consciousness and desire.
Objects as appearances are anot so much products of our minds but rather subjects and objects are two phenomena of an underlying reality structured like self-consciousness, that is, structured like desire which aims for persistence not absorption in another, perhaps Kantian moral love has some vague notion of this, not mastering or merging with the beloved but in a relation of reciprocated admiration and recognition, the dialectical forces of attraction and repulsion, sameness and otherness, annulling each other while preserving what is best. From an epistemological point of view at the level of knowing there are significant cognitive persistence conditions, that is, cognitive reproductive capacities, indeed for Kant there are transcendental, (necessary for experience not to be confused with transcendent), reproductive grounds for the possibility of experience, for to structure the spatial, temporal, causal, logical perceptual manifold, to bring it all together, requires holding on to one piece of it while moving on to another and in establishing a relation of love the old must be preserved alongside the new. Compare shifting attention between parts of an object, something has to be reproduced at the periphery of attention in order make what is attended to meaningful in any way, and a subject is doing this, not a world apart without any assistance from an individual subject.
Desire, (die Begierde), is a term introduced in the ‘Self-Consciousness’ section of the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ following on from the ‘Consciousness’ section wherein it had been demonstrated that all of our endeavours to know objects involves surreptitious activity of the subject and its concepts, assumptions and theoretical constructs. and with self-consciousness such self-centeredness of Spirit assumes a new form whereby Desire is our active will compelling objects to conform to our conceptions or wishes. Consciousness disclosed itself to be subject-centred in surreptitious fashion whereby actions disclosed themselves to be subject-centred, for in one way or another a subject is always endeavouring to bend things to make them conform to its wishes. ‘Self-consciousness is desire in general’, said Hegel. Spirit as self-consciousness has a dual object, the thing out there, given in perception, and itself, which is what it is in opposition to the thing. Self-consciousness ‘presents itself as the movement in which this opposition is removed, and the identity of [the self] with itself is established’. In brief, when the subject transforms objects according to its will it is actually being moved by the desire to confront itself, whereby the desire of the subject to annul the other and absolutize itself is the same thing as the desire to be confronted by the self and no other. It is the nature of consciousness that compels this state of affairs, for consciousness is always a two-termed relationship requiring a subject and an object, hence, when the subject wishes to know itself, it must split itself into a subjective side, which knows, and an objective side, which is known.
To know itself consciousness must find a mirror, and this means that if the goal of consciousness is self-knowledge, it cannot achieve this by annihilating all objectivity, but only by making objectivity reflective, by transforming objects into a mirror of consciousness, and just insofar as we desire to put our imprint upon all that is, to create a world for ourselves, we desire total self-reflection. The transformed object becomes an extension of oneself and no longer truly other, but note this is not a merging, it becomes a part of oneself but it is not like oneself. The subject thus will not be satisfied until it has seen its own nature in another being, and that other being has recognized it, in brief the drive for self-consciousness can only be satisfied by a being like the subject but the subject does not want merely to contemplate this other subject, it has to be affirmed by it in addition.
The subject can only be assured that it confronts another being like itself if the other being in turn recognizes it as a being like itself and at a stroke the subject will satisfy the desire for self-reflection and individuation, the recognition of the other subject will affirm it in its identity and present it with self-understanding as a being of a determinate sort. Desire in one way or another is at the root of all forms of Spirit: ‘Every activity of Spirit is nothing but a distinct mode of reducing what is external to the inwardness which Spirit itself is, and it is only by this reduction, by this idealization or assimilation, of what is external that it becomes and is Spirit’. All the activities of Spirit, all modes of human being, are forms in which we strive to overcome otherness: ‘In cognition what has to be done is all a matter of stripping away the alien character of the objective world that confronts us’.
Furthermore, freedom is only possible through overcoming otherness: ‘Freedom is only present where there is no other for me that is not myself’. And ‘freedom for which something is genuinely external and alien is no freedom; [freedom’s] essence and its formal definition is just that nothing is absolutely external’. Spirit’s triumph over the other is only fully actualized in science, rational inquiry in general, and ‘the aim of all genuine science is just this, that Spirit shall recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth’. Furthermore, Spirit ‘wills to achieve its own liberation by fashioning nature out of itself; this action of Spirit is called philosophy … The aim [of a philosophy of Nature] … [is] to give a picture of nature in order to subdue this Proteus: to find in this externality only a mirror of ourselves, to see in nature a free reflection of Spirit’ . The highest achievements of human Spirit are at root transformations of desire, which may appear at first consideration to be wholly negative, destructive and self-centred but the will to overcome otherness is seen in all of non-human or pre-human nature as well, for whereas faced with the opposition of an external world, a dog merely destroys or gobbles up the external, (eating its food, chewing the furniture etc.), it cannot make the world its own through thought, a human being on the other hand can master nature and absorb the external without thereby annihilating it.
And as we saw with Socrates’ account of the ascent to the Form of the Beautiful love will save you is not so much a fanciful romantic notion as quite literally true.
‘Descend, O heavenly Venus’
by Giuseppe Parini, (1729–1799)
Descend, o heavenly Venus,
and as a sign of your love,
Leave behind the sweet pledge
which we have always sighed for.
Scendi, celeste Venere,
e del tuo amore in segno
lasciane il dolce pegno
che sospirammo ognor.
